


tomorrow's dust flares into breath

by bloodbright



Series: Dishonored works [2]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, F/M, Gen, Low Chaos (Dishonored), Low Chaos Corvo Attano, M/M, Post-Dishonored (Video Game), Recovery, questionably DH2 compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-08 17:26:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11651271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: Truth is, Corvo’s six months in Coldridge have broken his health.





	tomorrow's dust flares into breath

Truth is, Corvo’s six months in Coldridge have broken his health.

He holds Emily’s hand all the way down from the top of the lighthouse. He thinks he ought to hand her off to Samuel; Havelock’s blood is still spattered down his front. But she clings to him where he sits hunched in the bow, and he can’t bring himself to protest.

Dunwall Tower belongs to a Kaldwin again. The royal quarters are scrubbed of any sign of the Lord Regent: the safe removed, the furniture replaced, the sheets burned. Emily takes possession of the central bedchamber that belonged to her mother, though she looks very small in the canopied bed.

The Royal Protector’s chambers are where they always were, adjoining the royal quarters, untouched: Corvo’s clothes are still in the drawers, his spare pistol still in its case. They seem to belong to a stranger. Corvo sleeps fitfully when he sleeps at all; he starts out in his own room and winds up crouched against the wall in Emily’s.

For Jessamine’s coronation, there’d been a procession with people cheering raucously for their beautiful young empress and throwing flowers; and after the High Overseer put the crown on her head, the servants rolled out great tuns of cider and brought out enough cakes for every last urchin to fill their pockets: a party to rival the Fugue Feast for drunken revelry and broken windows.

Emily gets a procession too. She walks the parade route with enormous dignity, her head held high, her face a pale smudge in the midst of her dark-uniformed guard. There are no flowers to be had, and the crowd is quiet and thin, ragged and hollow-eyed. The people of Dunwall are weeping in the streets: for Sokolov and Piero have found a cure for the plague.

Corvo stands behind Emily as she kneels for the crown; the Abbey, lacking a High Overseer, has produced a small child weighed down by heavy robes to do the honors. Then, with great care, the servants roll the barrels out.

The people surge forward; the guard struggles to hold them back. They drink directly from the dipper; they fill vials and flasks and mugs and bowls, anything they can bring. The cure is bitter as gall but they wipe their mouths and then lick their hands, they fall to their hands and knees to lap up a few drops where they’ve fallen in the dust.

The servants will be giving out doses all through the night; in the morning, they’ll start going door to door. The empress has ordered it. Corvo sees Emily to bed, leaves her to Callista’s brisk ministrations; he seeks his own bed. He shakes and shakes. He can’t get warm.

* * *

How many hours can you torture a man in a day?

Campbell is a busy man with vices to attend to; Burrows is trying to control a fractious city and contain a plague of his own making. They make time for Corvo, but their graciousness only extends so far.

Add another hour or two for the torturer’s amusement. But even he may grow to find the task tedious; he is a connoisseur, and today he has the fresh agonies of some other poor bastard to sample.

Say half an hour—though it feels an eternity—for the pain to recede from blinding to merely acute; another hour or two—perhaps three—for memory, rage, recrimination, self-loathing, despair, prayer without hope. Then still the day stretches on, a good three quarters of it remaining; and there will be another after it, and another after that. Death is slow in coming, and meanwhile the body makes its demands.

Most days, Corvo eats the food provided to him. He relieves himself in the bucket in his cell. He listens to the chatter of the guards, the raving of his fellow inmates; he looks out between the bars on his window. It’s a generous window, both tall and wide, with an excellent view of the top of Dunwall Tower.

Between his cell and the Tower, of course, is the yard where they do the executions. He doesn’t like to watch, but sometimes he listens. He’s going there someday soon, he thinks. Probably.

But they don’t want him to die yet. His wrists, torn open again and again on the unforgiving manacles of the interrogation chair, become infected; they ooze foul-smelling pus while he sweats and shivers in the grip of fever. He loses track of time. He gave up fighting months ago; but when they come for him he struggles blindly. He can’t even focus on the questions they put to him enough to refuse them.

The next day Burrows brings a doctor with him. In the navy, not best known for its tenderhearts, they etherize men for this procedure; but the doctor is satisfied to have a handful of guards hold Corvo down while he slowly pours caustic bromine into the wounds. Corvo loses himself somewhere between one scream and the next; he comes back only to find the doctor gesturing impatiently for the next vial.

The doctor wraps his wrists in clean white gauze before they put him back in the chair for the next session.

Head hanging forward, his breath coming in ragged gasps, the smell of his own burned flesh in his nose, he wonders dimly what they’ll do to hold him there if they have to amputate his hands. Perhaps they'll hang him upside down from the hook in the ceiling like a redshark awaiting the butcher.

He keeps his hands. Winter comes. He and most of the other residents of Coldridge catch the same wracking cough. It doubles him over, scrapes out the back of his throat and the bottom of his lungs until he spits blood; his convulsions pull painfully at the scabs on his back.

The minutes pass in a slow drip, wearing away what remains of him, but the days blur together. He loses more and more time in a shallow half-sleep that brings him no rest. Though his broken body twitches awake at every guard’s footstep, sleep is better than waiting, and six months can be a very long time.

* * *

It’s been eight months since he played bodyguard to an empress. His body remembers how to stand: a looseness swifter than tension, ready to strike in any direction.

But he isn’t as young as he once was. His back wants to grow stiff, his hips to lock up. He still beats the guards one-on-three when he spars—when they dare spar with him—but he pays for it in aching knees the morning after. There’s a bullet still lodged in his shoulder, courtesy of a Watch officer whose ambition outstripped his good sense; sometimes Corvo thinks he can feel it scraping against the bone.

No one likes to look directly at him. Their gazes land on the shiny burn scar under his eye and then slide away; but he can feel their constant awareness of him on his skin.

For Jessamine he’d been a shadow, silent and watchful, waiting to read her signal and doing his best to be invisible to the rest of the court.

For Emily he’s a presence. They address her, but never without flicking a furtive glance at him first. Occasionally—when the petitioner is a child, a plague widow, a destitute sailor with two rotting stumps wrapped in rags—he tries to look encouraging; mostly he tries to look intimidating, forbidding. It’s easier now than when he was a young man with a face pretty enough to catch the eye of an empress. The torturer has left his mark.

He stands guard. He doesn’t interfere. Emily, like her mother before her, will govern with her own judgment; Corvo has no head for it. Callista teaches her history and politics, literature when she’ll sit still for it; Sokolov geography and natural philosophy. There’s a dance master and a rhetorician and tutors in four living languages and two dead ones.

Emily, who is learning her own ways of finding things out, issues a royal invitation to the official naval historian. He’s a big man withered away, three short of the usual complement of fingers, with skin like leather and an incongruously high-pitched voice; he went to sea at twelve and spent thirty years there before he learned to read and turned to the books. He knows as many battles as she could wish for, and more beside: tactics and strategy and maneuvers, but also the moment the cannon bucks free of its chains and slides with swift inexorability across the deck; the officers roaring orders through the smoke at men gone deaf from the thunder of the guns, their hands blistering on the hot iron; the stink of sweat and fear and blood and gunpowder, and the leviathans who come for the survivors. Callista listens with more than her usual dutiful attention.

Emily shoots up four inches what seems like overnight. She can reload a pistol blindfolded, but she prefers the sword; Piero makes her a blade, shorter and lighter than Corvo’s, that folds up into a marvelously discreet little package. Sokolov suggests a few small improvements to the mechanism, which leads to a dispute that pleasantly occupies the two of them for weeks.

Corvo sleeps between clean sheets in his old familiar bed in the room off the empress’ chambers. He gets his jellied eels served on a silver plate instead of gulped out of a tin. He can go down to the armory and take as many boxes of bullets as he wants; if he wants, he can have a servant bring them up to him instead. He spends them in targets instead of bodies.

All is well. All is well. All is well, and better than he could possibly have imagined behind the walls of Coldridge.

Yet he’s only passing through the music room when a footman straightens from his work at the fireplace, poker in hand—head shaven, neckless, with a mean little face—and Corvo startles—staggers—forgets even to reach for his sword; stumbles away and vomits quietly in a corner.

* * *

Food often turns his stomach, and he doesn’t have the weight to spare. He loses whole days to fever, sweating and shivering no matter how high the servants stoke the fire.

It’s been a long time since he thought of the malarial ague that struck down half the population of Karnaca at intervals, and his mother more often than most. He’d escaped it, but it seems its dark cousin has come for him after all.

He doesn’t understand. During the conspiracy he ate little and slept less, running one mission after another on elixir and blind determination and the unnatural strength the Outsider’s Mark sent burning through his veins like whale oil set alight: unable to see a future beyond the next guard, the next gate, the next weeper, only the endless present.

Now he faints during an audience—just for a moment, but he wakes on the floor to find Emily peering anxiously into his face, pale to the lips, and a circle of guards crowded uselessly around them.

He tries to get up. She orders him to bed, and pointedly follows him to make sure he goes.

“And don’t think I won’t notice you creeping about the ceiling,” she says.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“If you don’t stay here, I’ll sit on you,” she says. He would argue, but his tongue is thick in his mouth. He can’t seem to find the words. The world seems to waver in front of his eyes.

It gets worse before it gets better, and he loses the better part of the next few days; but the day after that he takes his accustomed place behind her throne. She frowns at him, but allows it.

For the moment. After the second time, Emily demands curatives from Sokolov and Piero. After the third, she brings in specialists from the Academy and the Alchemic Council and the Addermire Institute against their united protests.

They poke and prod him—palpate his flanks, shine bright lights in his eyes, pull his lips back to examine his gums, make him swallow all manner of foul-tasting concoctions. Awake, he submits; shifts his limbs and opens his mouth and rolls over as directed. 

Somewhere in there he slips sideways. He lies still and shivers in confusion; and then in the grip of delirium he begins to struggle with frenzied strength and no skill, only animal desperation. He flings an arm out and someone goes reeling back clutching their nose, and then there are too many hands on him, holding him, forcing him down—

There’s a slender dark figure in the doorway—

“Corvo,” she says, in the voice of an empress. He goes limp all at once, his limbs turning to water.

“Jessamine?” he says weakly, trying to turn his head toward her.

“It’s me,” she says, coming closer. “Emily.”

“Emily?” he says.

“Leave us,” she says to the assembled parliament of medicos. He’s lost track of them somehow.

“You can’t—you can’t come in here,” he says, trying to sound certain. He fumbles for the fallen sheet with clumsy fingers. He can’t quite remember why, but she isn’t supposed to see him like this.

“I can go anywhere I want,” she says. “Empress, remember?”

“Oh,” he says. He’s finally untangled the sheet; he pulls it up and shrinks down under it.

She smoothes it down over his shoulder. “They’re only trying to help,” she says. There’s a catch in her voice.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, though he can’t quite remember what for.

“You only have to be sorry if you don’t get better,” she says, and presses a kiss to his forehead. 

The fever breaks overnight. In the morning, Corvo dresses himself: a dark shirt, buttoned high under his chin, the cuffs carefully done up; dark pants to match, then boots. The leather vest, stout enough to turn aside a pistol ball from afar or a glancing blow from a knife; then the gorget, settled around his neck. Blade, crossbow, pistol; supplies for each. Over it all goes the heavy coat, enveloping.

Then he goes to face Emily.

She’d been a healthy child for the most part, and determined not to let a mere sniffle keep her from the important business of Mrs. Pilsen’s next voyage across the courtyard to fight a sea monster. But on the rare occasions she was sick she’d wanted to curl up in her mother’s bed; and sometimes on those days Corvo would stay with her, read to her and coax her to drink some soup and stroke her hair until she fell asleep. It wasn’t supposed to be the other way around; and there were other things that were different then.

He’s early enough to catch her at breakfast where she usually takes it, in her sitting room. She jumps up to greet him, hesitates before hugging him and then hovers with unwonted solicitude until he sits down.

He catches himself worrying at his cuffs, makes himself stop. Usually she talks about the day ahead, does a little anticipatory complaining about her lessons; sometimes she tells him her dreams. This morning she’s too quiet, picking at her food and shooting him anxious glances when she thinks he isn’t looking.

“Are they helping at all?” she bursts out at last. “They cured the plague, surely they can fix you too—”

“No,” he says, low. “Emily, please. You don’t need to worry about me. I’m here, aren’t I?”

She narrows her eyes at him.

“I won’t leave you,” he says. “I promise.”

“Fine,” she says after a pause. “I’m holding you to it.”

He has no illness that can be named or cured; it’s only that he isn’t well. He has been betrayed too often by others. Now his own body is betraying him.

* * *

What he doesn’t tell Emily over breakfast:

In the dark hours of the night, as he lies half-awake, half-dreaming, there comes a chilly touch on his forehead: tracing down the center, smoothing down his brows; then pressing gently on his closed eyelids, cooling his burning eyes. He sighs gratefully—then goes very still. He opens his eyes.

The Outsider is sitting on the side of the bed.

“Stupid of me to think you wouldn’t show up without a shrine,” Corvo says, his voice a painful rasp. Is it a smile that touches the corner of the Outsider’s mouth?

“Sokolov’s elixir damages the kidneys and the lining of the stomach,” the Outsider says. “Piero’s affects the heart and the liver.”

“Ah,” Corvo says, thinking of elixir drunk hastily in abandoned apartments, their inhabitants long past help; of crouching, sodden and stinking, by the edge of what had once been a canal and had become a mass grave, rotten flesh under his fingernails and rot in his mouth, and swallowing it in great draughts and retching in between, poison upon poison. The times he’d gulped it down and the times he’d brought it carefully back for Emily so she could have an extra portion. He is suddenly remembering that river krust acid was widely rumored to be an ingredient in both. 

He says, carefully, “Emily?”

“Your dear Emily bears hardly any ill effects. The young heal swiftest of all. But you—all the valves of your heart have gone black. You bleed slowly inside.” The Outsider trails one cold finger down Corvo’s throat; its unhurried passage feels like a trickle of icy water. Corvo shudders once, hard.

“But you’re not dead yet,” the Outsider says. “What will you do with the time left to you?” He leans forward, very close, until all Corvo can see is the bottomless pits of his eyes—

Then he’s gone. The sheets where he was sitting are damp with seawater, and Corvo is alone again.

* * *

Emily should have a new Royal Protector, someone whose health can be relied on.

“Nonsense,” Emily says, when Corvo tries to tell her this. “Or are you telling me the training you’re giving me is no good? I can take care of myself when you’re sick. I don’t want anyone else.”

He should insist, but the words catch in his throat. Barring his sojourn in Coldridge and the Hound Pits, Corvo has lived in the Tower for the last fifteen years. But he failed his last charge, and he’s not an aristocrat. He has neither title nor money in his own right; he has no place in the Tower if he isn’t Royal Protector.

It makes him anxious. He grits his teeth and drags himself through the days, even when his vision wants to swim.

“Fine,” Emily says in exasperation, after the next time she catches him wobbling on his feet. “If I get some more guards, will you rest? You can train them yourself, if it makes you feel better.”

It might. Corvo watches the Tower guard at training; he asks Geoff Curnow for recommendations. He selects a handful of the best. Some of them have known Emily since she was born; at least two of them have been at the Tower longer than Corvo.

He follows each of them for days, creeping into their homes and reading their papers. This one lost every family member except a younger sister to the plague; another is the sole provider for a crippled grandfather, an drunkard of a mother, and a half dozen siblings. This woman is quiet, older, never married, but she’s shared an apartment with the same seamstress for a decade. One of them has four bone charms stuffed under his mattress; Corvo drops him from the list, along with the gambler.

The final roster includes Fletcher, unassuming and friendly but with something a little unnerving about the way he moves; Derrickson, who has a sniper’s eerie stillness and the skills to match; Rickard, the youngest of the lot and a member of the minor gentry, perhaps the most talented with a blade of all of them but with a tendency to run his mouth. Others: Baines, Siddall, Younge, Gladwin.

He doesn’t expect much of anything when Emily goes to review the City Watch. There’s a parade, then a sharpshooting contest, then drills on the training ground.

One of the Watch guards is a big man missing an ear, a vivid pink burn scar streaking down the same side of his face. He trains with grim discipline and notable skill: disarms his first partner, dumps the second on his ass in the dirt, forces the third to tap out. But in between bouts, his eyes follow Emily with a desperate intensity. There is something about him that seems familiar.

His name is Audley. “I was in the Tower Guard, sir,” he says, standing at a crisp parade rest that puts the rest of the City Watch to shame, his eyes fixed somewhere in the distance.

Why did he leave the Tower Guard?

“I was on duty when her majesty the empress was assassinated, sir,” he says. “I was sent to Coldridge for dereliction of duty.”

Does he think Corvo did it?

“I don’t know, sir,” he says, perfectly emotionless.

Would he like a new position?

At that, he does dart a surprised glance at Corvo. 

He’s a good man. He trains hard, fights well, watches Emily with guilt and determination. Corvo still finds it difficult to look at his scarred face.

* * *

The trouble, you see, is anticipation. The torturer, moved by a spirit of inspiration, puts the brazier directly in front of the chair and places his beloved poker among the hot coals, then leaves Corvo alone to contemplate it.

That’s the morning. Corvo doesn’t know how much time passes before Burrows and Campbell come in, but the torturer is close behind them: watching Corvo’s face, a shadow of eagerness in his brutish face.

All the muscles of Corvo’s back have clenched tight, so hard that a constant fine tremor runs through him, his vision narrowing. When Burrows speaks, Corvo barely hears it. He doesn’t answer.

Campbell casually backhands him. Corvo’s head snaps back and hits the headrest on the chair. It brings him back to himself a little, but not much.

He can see the torturer behind Campbell’s shoulder. He’s watching himself as if from a distance, and the torturer is watching him too. He’s breathing shallowly. His body doesn’t know what to do.

Will he beg today, or will he freeze like prey under a predator’s gaze? Lately it’s been the latter, but he’s been wrong before. When they first brought him in, he thought—insofar as he thought anything—that grief would numb him, that there could be no greater pain in store for him.

Burrows, who most wants Corvo to confess, alternates between smug condescension and the put-upon weariness of a man doing a distasteful duty, as if he can’t quite decide which role it is he’s supposed to play. Campbell is more leisurely, perhaps mildly entertained; a little bored, more interested in his personal diversions. He might prefer it if Corvo confessed, but only a little.

The torturer wants him to hold out. The torturer doesn’t speak, but there is a certain intelligence moving behind his dull eyes. The torturer, without a word, has taught him that neither protest nor struggle will avail; that whatever control or skill or endurance he thought he had bought with his sweat and blood in the streets, in the training yard, the torturer can reduce him to a mindless animal at will.

He knows Corvo more deeply, more thoroughly than a lover. Alone of the lost souls in Coldridge Prison, the torturer is happy.

So.

He leaves Campbell to the tender mercies of his Abbey brethren; Burrows to the mob or the scaffold, whichever gets to him first. It turned out to be slow-acting poison, slipped into his food at Coldridge. Something painful: his face is still frozen in a rictus of agony when his head is fixed on a spike on Kaldwin’s Bridge.

Havelock, Corvo dispatches without conscious thought, weary beyond measure, turning blindly to meet the rush from behind; but the torturer he finds and fights and kills.

It’s a foolish diversion. He knows it, creeping silently down the stairs; he knows it as he crouches in the rafters and feels his heart pounding in his ears, the blood throbbing in the scar under his eye. 

One shot for the hound. Two for the torturer; his finger jerks involuntarily a third time on the trigger, but the magazine clicks empty. The torturer is turning toward him.

No time to reload. He drops the pistol.

He saw the torturer’s body jerk with each bullet, but it doesn’t seem to slow him. He charges like a boar, only maddened by pain and no less dangerous, inhumanly strong. Corvo braces himself to meet him.

When it’s over he stands over the torturer’s body where it lies like a beached whale, a great pile of foul incomprehensible flesh. Then he picks up his pistol and reloads it, marveling as if from a very great distance at how steady his hands are. 

He leaves the Tower in a daze, hollowed out; he’s lucky that the guards have been thoroughly distracted by the Regent’s confession. But Emily is waiting for him, and a throne for her.

He thinks it’s over. He thinks he can forget.

* * *

Emily, who despite her youth has already seen the twin dens of iniquity that are the Golden Cat and the Hound Pits, wants to see the rest of this empire she’s inherited. She’s visited a slaughterhouse and a charity hospital and the docks down on the waterfront, toured the Office of the High Overseer and the Academy of Natural Philosophy and the flagship in the harbor. Perhaps in a few years she’ll make a state visit to Serkonos or distant Tyvia, or even to Morley where rebellion yet simmers below the surface.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, when she wants to see Coldridge Prison; but somehow it is.

“You can show me your cell,” Emily says. “It’s only fair—you saw mine already.”

Corvo nods as evenly as he can. It’s his responsibility to make sure she can go wherever she wants in safety.

Audley is with them today, walking at Emily’s side opposite Corvo; Baines and Younge are ahead of them, Derrickson following behind.

Coldridge is a fortress in its own right, with its own defenses and procedures. Even the empress has to wait for the sentry outside to call the all-clear before the heavy external door is raised, and then again for the inner door.

“So how’d you do it, Corvo?” says Rickard, looking around with interest. The prison guard gives him a hard look, which he ignores.

It’s strange to realize that no one knows the whole story. The Loyalists are dead. Corvo doesn’t know what happened to the guard who took a bribe to leave him the key; he doesn’t even remember which of them it was.

“The dark powers of the Outsider,” Corvo says, very dry.

Baines laughs.

“No, really,” Rickard says. “I admit the walls are impressive, but the guards don’t seem like much. Did you just walk right out past these stiffs?”

“Something like that,” Corvo says absently. They’re passing the guard station that had given him such trouble; there seem to be a few more men stationed in it than he remembers.

When their party crossed the bridge it floated up from the depths of his memory, unbidden: the dim sensation of his heels dragging on the bridge as he was carried across. He hadn’t thought he remembered anything between being knocked out and waking up in prison.

He keeps waiting for—expecting—something. Six months passed in a haze for him here. Corvo keeps his attention split between Emily, where it belongs, and Audley: who is perhaps a little tight about the mouth, a little more than usually grim.

They come to the cell, no different from any other, where he spent six months, and he feels nothing; they look into the kitchens, such as they are; they visit the prison infirmary, which he never saw. Not for him, the barely trained corpsman with dirt under his nails; for Corvo, they brought in a real doctor.

They step into the cavernous interrogation room. Corvo and Audley take up positions on each side of the door on the inside; the others wait outside.

Burrows’ portrait is gone. The torturer Corvo knew is dead; now some ordinary sadist plies his trade here, but the evidence of his work has been hastily hidden away in deference to the young empress’ tender sensibilities: the floor scrubbed clean, the brazier cold, the ashes swept away. The butcher’s hook has been raised; it hangs from the ceiling high above.

“Really worked you over good, didn’t they,” Audley says conversationally. Corvo starts; Audley isn’t usually one for idle chatter, has only ever addressed Corvo in the most coolly professional of tones. His arms are crossed, face stony, but his fingers are tapping on his arm.

“You too,” Corvo says. His voice comes out steady, nearly casual. “What did they even want with you?” He’s only half-listening, his heart pounding with some nameless emotion: Emily is examining the chair.

Audley gives him a sideways glance, a sardonic twist to his mouth. “They wanted me to say you did it,” he says. His hand twitches, like he’s stopping himself from touching the stump of his missing ear.

“You don’t know that I didn’t,” Corvo says. Emily has moved on to the tools on the table.

“Didn’t see you do it neither.” He shrugs. “They got bored of it quick enough. Not like you,” he adds, watching Corvo. “Used to hear you. On and on for hours.”

Corvo stares back at him, caught. 

It’s no secret what goes on at Coldridge. For all that Corvo wears his collar high and his cuffs snugly done, there’s a scar on his face to make it clear.

Emily thinks—that he was brave, that he defied her mother’s usurper and kept his stoic silence; that he was always going to break out and come for her. She remembers him as he was: the solemn Royal Protector who could nonetheless show flashes of dashing, who threw a lord out of a state dinner for making an improper remark to the empress and fought half a dozen duels for her honor.

But he’s only what Coldridge made of him: an animal with a wound at the center of him, whose every instinct tells him to curl up and hide until he finds out if it will be fatal or merely crippling; whether it will heal or succumb to corruption. He had thought of it once or twice, unwillingly, unbidden: crawling into an abandoned bed in one of the apartments with the stairs blocked so the only way to enter was from above, and sleeping away the death throes of a city around him.

But Emily was waiting for him. Emily was waiting for him to return.

So here he is, drawn into the open, exposed: with a wound so fragile that it feels a direct look would reopen it; so tender it cannot bear the weight of contempt, pity, sympathy, surprise—any touch at all.

All this time he has been numb. Now he is a raw nerve.

“Felt like longer,” Corvo says, too late. His hoarse voice is strange in his own ears.

A clatter of metal—he flinches violently, stumbles. His back hits the wall. Emily has somehow knocked half the torturer’s tools onto the ground; and he knows Audley is still looking at him.

* * *

“Late night, Corvo?”

It’s the Outsider, crouching in front of him where he sits on the edge of his bed. In the darkness his face is unearthly white, his eyes like black pits.

“Hello,” Corvo rasps.

“Returning to Coldridge, where you spent so many days locked up while your world crumbled around you. Did you enjoy your visit?” the Outsider says. “You could still take your revenge on the guards. Do you wish you had?”

“No,” Corvo says, horrified to hear his voice shake, and lets his head drop back into his hands.

A touch on his wrists—the Outsider draws his hands away from his face. Corvo stares wildly into the Outsider’s depthless eyes. There’s nowhere for him to go.

The Outsider touches his face curiously: cups his cheek, strokes the shell of his ear, feathers a thumb over his eyelashes; presses the pad of one finger into the shiny burn scar under his eye where Corvo can’t feel anything, and scrapes gently along the edge of it where he feels too much.

He holds still for it. He can’t catch his breath.

“Were you watching me in Coldridge?” he whispers. He doesn’t know what he wants the answer to be.

“Yes,” the Outsider says, caressing his hair. “I saw every moment. Everything they did to you, I saw. Every burn and every blow, every time you screamed, I was watching.”

A few words, the clink of metal, and he’s there again: the blind animal panic welling up in his chest, his stomach, his hands; the dumb thing in him that knows nothing of reason, only the scent—the sound—the fall of light that forebodes inescapable pain. That which is written into the body is not quickly erased.

He’s already in his shirtsleeves, without vest or coat; now his shirt seems to fall open under the Outsider’s hands. He lets the Outsider push it off over his shoulders.

“I could tell tales of each of your scars,” the Outsider says. “Would you like that, Corvo? This one came from one of Daud's assassins. The Overseers cornered him like a rat in the end. Here, a rather large hagfish. You should be more careful in the water, Corvo. And this one came from Daud himself. He was a fine fighter, wasn’t he? But no match for you. Ah, but you don’t care about those, do you?”

He smoothes his cold thumb along the tendons of Corvo’s scarred wrist. “The mark of the chair. How you struggled! You speak so little—no one would imagine the words you spewed there, or the sounds you made under the lash. But I know. I heard them.”

His hands slide down Corvo’s ribs, mapping out that irregular topography too. Corvo shakes, laid bare, some nameless emotion thick in his throat; the Outsider in his cool distant voice murmuring a history of pain in his ear.

He uncurls Corvo’s fingers, traces the crooked length of each one, tests the joints that no longer straighten all the way. “For these, the hammer, the chisel,” he says. “You might not appreciate it, but he did a very tidy job.”

Corvo’s pants are still on, but the Outsider traces unerringly over the long scar on his thigh. “Now, this one—the torturer made you choose. You said right, so he went left. It wasn’t the last time he pulled that trick. You thought he would take the eye, but he wanted to wait. His plans were extensive and very specific.

“He worshipped me, you know,” the Outsider says thoughtfully. “He laid a great many things on my altar. But the most interesting thing he left me was you.”

Corvo shivers at that, but all his muscles have unclenched at last. There’s nothing for him to hide. The Outsider, who knows nothing of pity and whose disdain is universal, who sees all of him and expects nothing, requires nothing—his indifference is like a cool balm to a wound.

“His name was Morris Sullivan,” the Outsider says. “Him, you killed. If you’d let him go, I might have thought you inhuman altogether. But then, I suppose your scars say otherwise, don’t they?”

Corvo closes his eyes. His scarred skin, his broken body: standing behind Emily he feels the eyes of the court like pressure on his skin—wondering, expecting, speculating—closing in until he can barely breathe. But the Outsider’s cool gaze pierces right through him, so sharp he feels no pain.

* * *

The Royal Protector—even a lowborn Serkonan—might have had his pick of lovers, but he’d never wanted any of them; not when—well. Perhaps the court would have liked him better if he had, if he’d shown himself to be like the rest of them, if they’d been able to draw him into their constant squabbles and maneuvers and jockeying for position.

The Royal Protector is privy to many secrets, and has both the imperial ear and unfettered access to the imperial treasury. Two hundred years before Corvo was born, Jocosa Dunne had de facto run the Empire for Yefim Olaskir—it was in Callista’s lessons—and there had always been whispers that Gerhard Beck had an unseemly degree of influence on Euhorn Kaldwin.

In another life, Dunne might have made a great statesman, or an able regent for Yefim’s young son. But the Royal Protector is a bodyguard first and last, and Yefim was quickly deposed by his cousin after she took a poisoned bolt meant for him.

Corvo hadn’t known this, of course. He’d been chosen for his talent with a blade, and then had an approximation of the etiquette courtiers spent their entire childhood mastering hastily stuffed into his head, like sardines into a can already packed solid. He had known nothing of history, nothing of politics—nothing of power; and it was only years of bitter experience later that it finally occurred to him that his lack of connection might itself have been attractive to an emperor seeking a protector for his daughter in an ever-shifting web of alliance and betrayal. For what other reason would wily old Euhorn Jacob Kaldwin have allowed a Serkonan of neither family nor fortune to be presented as a candidate?

But then, in some respects, being Royal Protector had been very simple. His duty was to go where his charge did, and Corvo had always tried to do his duty. Even when it meant standing stone-faced outside while Jessamine enjoyed bedsport with whichever aristocrat had her favor this month.

Sometimes she’d spend the night; sometimes she’d come out tousle-haired, flushed, and smile dreamily at him—make him walk back to her chambers beside her instead of letting him take his accustomed place behind her and slightly to the right; hold onto his arm and lean her head on his shoulder.

Once she’d left early with tear-tracks on her face and told him that if Lord Ainsley tried to see her, he was to be denied entry immediately and without recourse.

“Thank you, Corvo,” she said. He nodded, throat too tight to speak. 

It was some months later that she’d asked him to bed for the first time.

She said it lightly, half-smiling, but he’d watched her deal with ministers and aristocrats and lovers who expected too much and a father who alternated between indulgent and domineering for long enough to know that she was not as careless as she sometimes liked to seem. She knew all the reasons not to do it—the scandal, the heartbreak—better than he did, and she’d asked anyway.

So he’d gone, his hands shaking, his heart in his throat; and she’d laughed at him, delighted rather than cruel, and drawn him down with her, and he’d given her everything he had to give. He’d already promised her his life in her service; it was little enough and joy besides to give her his body into the bargain.

Her father died; she took the throne. After that she had less time for flirtation, less interest in new lovers. She was preoccupied with other things: the ongoing unrest in Morley; the rising price of whale oil; the Abbey grasping for ever greater control over a sinful populace; a fractious Parliament intent on testing what a young and inexperienced ruler might let them get away with; Emily. The plague.

He was not the last man she had; there were still nights he stood watch outside a closed door. Such is an empress’ prerogative.

But she came more often to him, and lingered longer, and kept him after others had been discarded; and once when he’d taken a wound in her defense—the merest scratch, but the blade had been poisoned—in the days that followed she’d read the unrelenting piles of documents that formed the business of governing at his bedside instead of her study, had taken all her meetings in the adjoining room.

And so Corvo’s foolish, artless, steadfast heart had dared to love an empress.

* * *

Emily increases funding for the Academy, declares that the plague cure will be made available free of charge in perpetuity, orders plans drawn up for a charity hospital in the Tailors’ District. The plague is over, but her mother’s work continues.

Corvo finds one of Jessamine’s golden hairpins fallen down between his bed and the wall, and he sits down and cries. It’s been three years. Emily is empress, and he is still alive.

The easy suppleness of youth is lost to him, but the skill written into his muscles still remains. He dashes the sweat from his face and begins to remember the old familiar pleasure of a bout well-fought, when he’d trounce some guardsman or slumming aristocrat determined to take the Serkonan down a notch and then look up to see the silent laughter in Jessamine’s eyes. 

Emily can’t best him yet, nor will she for years, but he thinks he can see the day coming. She trains hard and uncomplainingly. He watches her delight in her own growing strength, and wonders that anyone ever thought to keep her locked away.

When his health allows, he takes her out to run across the roofs of Dunwall and learn her city from above. Emily is sure-footed and swift; she climbs with the fearless strength of youth, and only laughs when she scrapes her knuckles and knees.

In all the years he spent with Jessamine, he’d hardly seen the city streets beyond the Tower gates, save perhaps from the carriage on the way to a party at a walled estate, with guards before and behind. He went where she went, which was hardly anywhere at all. An empress need never stir from her palace; if she wishes to see someone, they come to her, aristocrat and scholar and seamstress alike.

Now Emily and Corvo peer down into the distillery and leap from balcony to balcony along the boulevard, from one freshly painted facade to the next. They balance atop rail cars and perch like a pair of gargoyles in the rafters of the new station in Drapers Ward.

They creep about the Tower at night and dare Emily’s guard to catch them; the ones who do get invited to join the occasional nighttime excursion, which they accept with varying degrees of wariness and enthusiasm.

Audley and Corvo mostly give each other a wide berth, but eventually the distance between takes on a respectful if not precisely apologetic air. Audley’s edges have been blunted; time has done its work on him too. Baines gets married, and then produces twins; Younge retires. Corvo takes on a small handful of replacements, and Emily suggests her maid Agnes for training; she takes to it with alacrity. Perhaps it was always a mistake to entrust the empress’ safety to a single man. 

He remembers Granny Rags, waiting and waiting for her black-eyed boy; he remembers the ammoniac stink of the apartment on Kaldwin’s Bridge where a lone survivor raved, smearing piss and blood and semen on a rune in vain, trying to make it speak; he remembers the Outsider’s disdainful words for Sokolov, performing disgusting rituals under the Abbey to compel his appearance.

Corvo asks for nothing. He has little use for the Outsider’s gifts these days. The Outsider guarantees no futures, and the beloved dead are beyond even his reach.

“You could be the Duke of Serkonos,” the Outsider says. “Or emperor.”

Corvo doesn’t dignify that with an answer. The Outsider doesn’t look displeased to be refused, but he does try again.

“Your health, perhaps,” he says.

“You’ve never healed anyone in your life,” Corvo says. “Admit it.”

“I could send a few nights of inspiration to Piero,” the Outsider says. “I haven’t paid him a visit in a while.”

“ _No_ , thank you,” Corvo says, imagining his own chest split open and filled with barbed wire and clockwork. “Leave the poor man alone.”

“If you wish,” the Outsider says. “You are so much more interesting.”

Corvo has no answer to that, but the Outsider doesn’t seem to require one. Sometimes Corvo wakes in the middle of the night and the Outsider is there, sitting on the floor with his back against the side of the bed, one leg drawn up, thinking his own inscrutable thoughts. Like this, with his inhuman eyes hidden, he might look like any ordinary young man, if not for the way the moonlight spilling across the carpet shies away from his skin, the way the rest of the world seems to recede around him.

Sometimes Corvo closes his eyes and goes back to sleep, obscurely reassured; sometimes he looks down at that dark head for a while until the Outsider tips it back and fixes him with those lightless eyes.

Jessamine died. He thought that was the end; he thought he’d forgotten how it felt to desire anything but the cessation of pain. Now his body is remembering hunger again. 

* * *

Some mornings—some nights—Corvo wakes uncertain of his location; Emily pretends not to notice, but she knows not to startle him. She hugs him, sometimes. He spars with the guard, more often now that he’s training some of them: sometimes with swords, sometimes with bare fists, and though there’s something in the impact of flesh on flesh, it’s not enough.

He remembers Lydia calling him a gentleman in her straightforward way, standing a little too close, unsmiling but with an dryly inviting tilt to her mouth. Now the servants keep a carefully respectful distance, and the court watches him but gives him a wide berth, and it makes him both grateful and restless. 

If he wanted he could visit the Golden Cat, or find a mistress among the aristocracy who would overlook a great many things for the sake of access. She would probably pretend to love him. He might never know the difference.

He doesn’t want to do that. The idea of it makes his chest ache.

Then he wakes with a gasp from a dream—his hands clenched in the covers, the sheets twisted around his legs—to find the Outsider leaning over him.

“Really, Corvo,” the Outsider says. “Your resolve is admirable, but surely there’s no reason to deprive yourself.”

Corvo’s body is already awake, and ravenous. He can feel himself flushing hot.

The Outsider raises Corvo’s hand to his lips and kisses the Mark; kisses the scarred wrists, white against Corvo’s dark skin. Then he takes Corvo’s face in his hands—

—and Corvo dares to reach back.

The Outsider’s skin looks cold and wet, smooth as marble, but touch reveals its hidden nature like that of whaleskin: fascinatingly sleek if stroked the right way, so sharp it cuts if stroked in the wrong direction. You could wear your palms bloody on him.

His mouth is cold, and tastes of brine.

His touch is strange, everywhere at once, overwhelming; sometimes it seems he has more limbs than he should. Corvo’s body doesn’t know what to make of it on him, over him, inside him.

He feels as if he can hardly bear the terrible intimacy of touch; his body, which is all he is, all he has: to give, to be taken from him—

Once it was only Jessamine who knew his body—how to touch him to draw the response she wished, which he desired most ardently to give her; a body of whose few scars he might have been at least a little proud, and she imprinted on it with her own skin her care, her love, her desire.

But it passed from her gentle custody to that of the torturer, that violent usurper, who performed his own experiments with close attention and learned too to draw the responses he wished from Corvo’s body against Corvo’s will, and made him a prisoner in his own flesh; who left his own indelible mark, inside and out.

This is the body the Outsider touches now, which he knew deeply before ever he touched it; and how long has Corvo already borne the Outsider’s Mark?

Corvo groans helplessly. He can’t make himself stop, which seems to please the Outsider; he writhes, he makes sounds half-bitten off.

He once dared love an empress. Why not then a god? He asks for nothing. He only gives himself up to that which is greater than himself.

When it is finished he lies cradled against the Outsider’s chest and looks out toward where the corner of the carpet gives way to the Void. Is there something a little startled among the strange constellations in the Outsider’s eyes?

And have there been others here before him—the Marked, the chosen? Granny Rags, who longed for the black-eyed boy who abandoned her; Daud, who killed—

“Other men close their hands,” the Outsider says abruptly. “They clutch at power. They struggle to extend their control over others. Some of them pretend to morals and justifications at first, but they always use my gifts for petty personal gain in the end. But not you.

“Your choices are always fascinating,” the Outsider says. “But I don’t think you would ever have thought to make this choice, would you, Corvo? Not for yourself.” Corvo feels him smile against his hair. “But then, you have surprised me before.”

* * *

The Outsider comes and goes according to inexorable whims of his own: three nights in a row when the moon is full, then gone for a fortnight; twice in a week, four times the next, then not at all for a month, though Corvo hears the whales singing from the distant harbor and thinks of him.

He chose, once, to make an oath to Jessamine. He never thought to outlive it. Now he bears the mark of a being older than the isles. Should the Outsider’s visits cease altogether, still Corvo would know that he persists in the Void: eternally young and incomprehensibly old, untouched by age or disease or sorrow.

When the Outsider is away and Emily is asleep he comes down to the gazebo alone and stands by Jessamine’s grave, looking out over the river. It’s late in the Month of Wind; the air is bracingly cold. He hunches down into the high collar of his coat.

It’s beautiful, here, watching the lights on the far shore through the mist. It’s too far to make out even in daylight, but one of them is the Hound Pits. Cecelia will be closing up, sending the the last drunks stumbling out the door and wiping down the tables until they gleam softly golden in the low light; maybe Samuel is there, too, sitting at the bar to keep her company and nursing his last drink.

The Heart is often quiet now, slow to speak and confused when it does. Its voice echoes as if from very far away. Now it lies quiescent in his hands.

He presses it to his lips, tucks it back into his coat. The heavy lump of it has become so light it might dissolve into nothing. He can imagine a future now, stretching out before him like the lights on the river: dimly seen, but each a beacon leading to the next; no longer a succession of days to be endured.

He still can’t save her, but in the Void Jessamine’s body no longer lies sprawled across the floor of an untethered gazebo. Her grave is peaceful, and the flowers he places there in a dream never wither away.

* * *

The ship came sailing around the cape to the river’s mouth, the fortress on Kingsparrow Island silhouetted against the sky to the north; and though he came bearing ill news, though he knew the plague still held the city in its deadly grip, still his heart leapt in his chest to know that he was coming home.

Will there come a time when he can think of it—the unaccustomed sunshine like a welcome from Dunwall, and Emily running to greet him, and Jessamine so glad to see him, that last beloved glimpse of her—without pain?

He was a young man when he left Karnaca—malaria and bloodflies, the hot sun and the sirocco, the choking dust of the mines and the miners old before their time, stooped and coughing, their skin turning blue—and came to Gristol. To Dunwall, to grey skies and a permanent chill and the glittering court, to slaughterhouses pouring their refuse into the river and the smell of burning oil; and the rot beneath it all, the rats waiting their chance to devour.

He is older now, and a fool twice betrayed; and yet—it seems—

The sea has its seasons and its tides, and perhaps so too the Void and the affairs of men. Though leviathans still make their mysterious way through the deep, the sea is quiet tonight. The world has gone softer—brighter—there’s something different in the quality of the light—

The avatar of the Void is busy tonight, all his vision narrowing to one man who has loved well if not wisely, who once chose the softer way; who has offered up what time remains to him. A golden age is coming to Dunwall.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is on tumblr [here](http://bloodbright.tumblr.com/post/163651142546/tomorrows-dust-flares-into-breath-bloodbright).


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